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Messages - koiwai

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61
7DRLs / Re: the Hunt - 7DRL 2014 - Update Thread: Finished
« on: March 21, 2014, 03:49:39 AM »
Liked the game a lot. Guys, you should definitely try it.

By the way, Hi, why don't you put this game online. It is JS+HTML anyway. So, everyone can run it without downloading.

62
7DRLs / Re: Arena (7DRL 2014) [FAILURE]
« on: March 18, 2014, 11:14:32 PM »
Your calculation was spot on koiwai! It's implemented and working beautifully :)
Glad to hear that!
Yeah, there is no perfect language ) Just pick the one you enjoy the most. I usually program in OCaml or in C.

Also, I think, you did pretty well, considering that this is your first serious attempt to make a game, and there was some unexpected work that had to be done.

63
7DRLs / Re: Arena (7DRL 2014) [FAILURE]
« on: March 18, 2014, 03:56:34 PM »
Regarding the view area. If I understand your idea, you want to avoid displaying anything what is outside the map, so when the player is in the middle of the map, he is shown in the center of the screen, but when he approaches the corner, the camera stops moving and the player ends up in the corner of the screen, as show in the screenshot.

If this is correct, it seems to me that the following code should work:
Code: [Select]
Let (px, py) by the position if the player.
Let (w,h) be the width and the height of the map.
Let d = 15.

// the center of the visible area, the "camera" so to say
cx = min(max(px,d), w-d-1)
cy = min(max(py,d), h-d-1) 

// the corner of the visible area
x0 = cx - d
y0 = cy - d

Then, to output, you iterate the points:
x = x0, ... (x0+2d+1), and
y = y0, ... (y0+2d+1)

I'm curious, why did you choose Kotlin as the implementation language?

64
7DRLs / Re: Fida'i - 2014 7DRL
« on: March 18, 2014, 12:01:58 PM »
Hahaha, Vanguard, I like your point. Still, outsmarting some regular-ish behavior feels more rewarding, I think, than outsmarting random( 8 ). Although I agree that AI blindly following a route is a pretty dumb behavior too.

As an idea:
Consider the following approach, you can call it "Flow map". For all walkable tiles, you define the preferred direction of motion (not necessarily 8-directional). To generate such a map, you start with a single closed non-intersecting path, then perturb the map little by little, making so that eventually, following the map, when far away from the original path, you gradually converge to it, or move along that path. [Something resembling this] The unit using this map still moves randomly, but its movement is biased to following this flow map rather than being completely random.

I'm just thinking what can be done, probably, this is not a good idea at all.

65
7DRLs / Re: Here Be Dragons (7DRL 2014 - finished)
« on: March 17, 2014, 10:33:31 PM »
I agree, the graphic style is very well done (I like a lot the foggy boundaries, the feeling of adventure!). And the idea of team selection is applealing. Hope, you will complete the remaining abilities, and maybe add some global quests to give the sense of exploring a bigger world, with some final goal to achieve. ::) 

66
7DRLs / Re: Fida'i - 2014 7DRL
« on: March 17, 2014, 08:16:31 PM »
Played a little bit. In the best attampt, I reached mission 3. I wish that my FOV was larger, maybe 180 at least. Finding the target is hard sometimes.

For a stealth-like game, I would like to see the map better, maybe even to have some supernatural perception for seeing/hearing through walls and smoke (by drinking/smoking something?). So the game would become a puzzle. Also, it would be great if the guards were patrolling  routes, not just walking randomly, and maybe the map was a bit more regular. Currently, the game feels a bit chaotic, and I feel half-blind. I see the merits of this design, but I want to be more in control of the situation.  ::)

67
Other Announcements / Re: Let's Play... a Bunch of Roguelikes!
« on: March 16, 2014, 09:32:03 PM »
This is awesome news! I was really missing your letsplays, GH! Hope to see you playing my game eventually, but I don't want pushing it on you now, maybe later at some point  ;D

68
7DRLs / Re: Rogue Station [7DRLC '14]
« on: March 16, 2014, 08:13:12 PM »
It works on Linux, did not play a lot. When pressing Shift+direction, the guy walks way too fast for some reason. Is it a bug?

69
7DRLs / Re: Horddays (7DRL 2014 - SUCCESS) - devlog
« on: March 16, 2014, 07:02:28 AM »
Participation in an event such as 7DRL is a truly exciting life experience. Designing and programming games was my primary hobby for very long time. Since early childhood, I was making games to play with my brother and occasionaly other family members. Although, I was always considering myself to be a slow developer, enjoying the process, spending weekends and sometimes whole weeks, creating worlds first in my head and translating them into code. I have no doubt, I came to programming through games, and I still like
writing code thanks to games!


Planning (Unexpected things happen).

A week ago, it was a late night, Wednesday or Thursday, I was doing some boring work and tried watching Highschool of Dead. I kind of like the zombie worlds, and apocalyptic worlds in general. When I was younger, I read John Christopher's novels quite a lot. All TV Shows like Survivors or Jericho are awesome and I like them a lot. But at the same time, recent seasons of The Walking Drama Queens are frustrating to watch. So, somehow, the desire to write my own Cataclysm-ish RL came to my mind.


The initial thoughts were:

(1) Zombies should not be treated as entirely individual units. Their hordes should be programmed with the flocking model.

Pros: Easy to implement, probably novel, and hopefully fun.
Cons: Never tried that.

(2) Zombies don't need good AI. They must be dumb, and there will be a lot of them. Hoping that flocking behavior can make up for the absence of real smart AI.

Pros: Perfect for the 7 days time limit.
Cons: Dumb mobs are not fun.

After this initial idea crystallized, the next day, I added a few more design decisions that are not extremely novel, but they fit the setting nicely:

(3) Zombies' senses are limited, some can only hear, others can only see, etc.

Pros: Adds variety.
Cons: Programming them takes time, but its reasonable.

(4) Good to have 3D environment. It was kind of a big deal for the Cataclysm community. Although, I did not want the shooting-from-the-roof type of 3D. I wanted some more parkour-ish environment with high and low places, ramps, and whatnot.

Pros: Should be fun, I want to be able to hide and run away from the hordes.
Cons: Never tried programming 3D environments.

(5) Since programming the inventory can be a big hurdle, let's make the inventory work like a stack: the character has to use the first item from the top of the stack.

Pros: That is manageable. Also, adds some constraints, which can be good.
Cons: Questionable decision. Adds some constraints, which can be bad.

At this point I realized that this whole thing sounds like a nice 7DRL idea. And what is even better:

(6) I don't need fancy data structures to implement everything! (Only the linked list for the inventory). So, I can program the whole thing in plain C, and I have some experience programming a crossplatform game in it, so there will be a Windows build too, in addition to the source code for Linux, OSX, and other unixes.

Pros: I love plain C. Also, I have some code for SDL rendering already.
Cons: Never programmed a roguelike in C. It is C, so no fancy stuff allowed.

With all this in mind, I felt really tempted to take part in 7DRL 2014!


The challenge.

It was very enjoyable. Fortunately, loading the tileset images, and the tiles blitting functions were already implemented for my another project, so I could focus on the inner workings. And try to keep things as simple as possible. Maybe surprisingly, C is great for that. It encourage O(1)-time constructions like inegers, arrays, structures, pointers.

The first 1.5 days, I spent laying out the main game systems, particularly, the 3D environment, and the field of view algorithm. For the 2D filed of view, I could translate my old code from OCaml to C (although it was non-trivial, considering the fact that the old code used recursion and anonymous functions, but it was easier that writing the whole thing entirely from scratch). To making vision three-dimensional, I essentially cheated. The world was a simplified 3D world, without things like bridges, floors, or roofs. So, some modification of the 2D FOV code worked good enough.

Then, the mobs were added. By the end of Sunday, I made a reasonably good time system, and flocking behavior for zombies. Also added smell and hearing as the first two perception mechanisms. This is where I got by the end of the weekend.

By the end of Tuesday, I made a reasonably good map generation with connected levels. Mobs and the player are dealing damage. Also added sight as the mobs' third sense. Implemented the inventory and items picking up. No actual items yet. Work makes things go slower, but I'm still going pretty good.

Wednesday was not very productive - I've got food poisoning, but still managed to add some basic items like Medkit, Rock, and Antidote (oh, irony).

On Thuresday, more items were added, including weapons. Even better level generation and overall parameter balancing. Levels are getting bigger with difficulty, and items are added gradually. Overall, there was enough contents to play for 7-9 levels, and most likely even further. Although the game gets harder with each level.

On Friday, I did not have a lot of time to work on the game, but I tried to finalize and wrap up the whole thing. The game was uploaded to github, and I produced the Windows build. There was one unexpected issue, the amount of memory allocated on the stack was too large to run on Windows (32bit), so I had to change the memory allocation method for the main game state object to the heap. Minor problem, but really annoying.

The week of work was definitely successful! Hope, the result will be fun and interesting for players.


Afterthoughts

Not a lot, I'm still trying to have rest and finally sleep for more than a few hours. Started playing games made by others. Participation in something like 7DRL is a good thing, particularly if one has a clear vision of the game, and you exactly know how it can be done. Probably, It's important to hit the sweet spot, balancing the familiarity of implementation and the novelty. The idea must permit easy implementation. You have to like programming games too. Hahaha, obviously.

Even a month ago, I could not imagine myself making a full game in such a short time span. I'm not sure if I will be able to pull it off next time. If I'll get a good idea, really hope so.

70
Programming / Re: A guide to using a scripting language in games
« on: March 16, 2014, 01:07:37 AM »
I see a few uses for a scripts:

First. They can be reloaded on the fly, in the middle of the game, without the need to 1) save the game state, 2) rebuild 3) restart 4) load the game state. So, you can dynamically adjust the game without recompiling the game.

Second. Like javascript in browsers or shell script (like bash) in Unix, you can make a console and call your script functions from inside the game to change its state (spawning mobs, getting items, etc.)

Third. If the scripting language has nice API, you can delegate scripts programming to game designers. I'm thinking of the games like Neverwinter Nights, where you could make your own maps with scripted events. In NWN, I even implemented something like a chessboard with monsters acting like chess pieces. You could give commands to them via a master monster.. So yes, scripts can be quite fun.

71
7DRLs / Re: Succession (7DRL 2014 - Complete)
« on: March 16, 2014, 12:54:07 AM »
Using mouse on laptops usually implies using touch pad. Very annoying, especially when there are enemies nearby, and you cannot click to move several squares at once. vim-keys (hjklyubn) actually help, no metter how retarded they seem. Many laptop users, like myself, already got used to those keys.

72
7DRLs / Re: 7DRL Success: Hellspace
« on: March 15, 2014, 11:45:58 PM »
Nice game. I played it through on Easy, but Normal seems playable and not too much harder now. The key is to follow the arrow, and don't try to clear the level )

Really expected a worm in the end, do you fight it only on Normal difficulty? Or, maybe, the corridor itself was the worm?

In the keybindings, 'u' is set for inventory, but it collides with "hjklyubn", I had to reset that.

It seems that bent geometry of some map pieces is not easy to incorporate into otherwise rectangular map. Shooting can be problemmatic. Crossing bent corridors is probably difficult to implement - you have to somehow decide how to rotate the map correctly. Your approach was probably to break the map into a bunch of rectangular pieces and "magically" join them, so that units "teleport" between these pieces. Looks interesting, sadly it did not become a significant feature of the game. Still, it was fun to walk through these corridors, especially in the last fight, it added some unsteady off balance feeling, which is really awesome.

73
7DRLs / Re: Goldfish (7DRL 2014, Success)
« on: March 15, 2014, 05:10:01 PM »
Played the game, actually completed it.

The game is fun, and it works fine. The pond area, the dungeons, the Inventory. Quite a lot of stuff is in there. I thought that at some point I will have to adjust my items to fight special enemies (very quick, oxygen draining, very tough but slow), but it was not the case. For example, in the beginning, I was really afraid of octopus, because the sea horse said so, but he was not that tough.

In general, the difficluty scales with levels, but so do items, so the gameplay feels a little repetitive after 3-4 dungeons. Still, the game is not very long, and it remains fun to play. Also, playing as a fish, and getting better jaws and scales is amusing. Very enjoyable.  :)


74
7DRLs / Re: horddays (7DRL 2014) - devlog
« on: March 14, 2014, 10:14:59 PM »
The source code is available at Github (for Linux and OSX):
https://github.com/a-nikolaev/horddays

Soon, I will upload the Windows build too.

Update:
Windows (32bit) build - https://github.com/a-nikolaev/horddays/releases/download/v0.7d.1.win/horddays-win.zip
Please let me know in case of any problems.

75
7DRLs / Re: horddays (7DRL 2014) - devlog
« on: March 14, 2014, 08:25:54 PM »
Samildanach: Happy to hear. The playable version will be available soon.

Yesterday, I could accomplish almost everything I wanted. Not all items were implemented, but there is enough content to play at least for 7-9 levels. Actually, the fun part starts around level 5.



Thursday
- Grenades
- Smoke
- Pistol
- HP goes down when infected.
- Smell vision device.
- Map generation: Houses/fences.
- Map generation: Small obstacles.



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